Amazingly timely and prescient in parts still considering it was written over a decade ago.

Gladwell does an excellent job of illuminating the various ways 'gut feelings' and instinct can inform our decision-making, thoughts and actions but I wasn't 100% sold on his attempt to thread the needle and pull it all togther into one overall thesis. This was still a very good book and a recommended read though.

Funny in parts but not quite as much as people had claimed.

Memoir as novel or the other way around? Some hilarious parts, esp. when the author lets his imagination run away from itself (which is often!), but overall a little too Po-Mo or meta for my taste. It manages to veer between sentimentality, hope, cynicism and despair pretty ably but overall, the non-traditional narrative elements and super critical acclaim & hype surrounding this book ultimately made this somewhat of a let-down for me in the end.

Modern high literature masquerading as pulp fiction detetcive novel? 'Motherless Brooklyn' is most noteworthy for its amazingly in-depth examination of the narrator's various Tourette's symptoms but I would would give this deceptively simple story a thumbs-up just on the basis that it's set in the same Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn neighborhood that I currently live in. Court Street, represent!

Solid read: works both as a personal memoir and a cultural/social history of hip hop music and the industry that surrounds it from a Caribbean-American perspective.